


Fragments

by dreadcrums



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: F/M, Fate & Destiny, Fluff and Angst, POV Zelda (Legend of Zelda), Resurrection Shrine Swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:22:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28795329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadcrums/pseuds/dreadcrums
Summary: It was always a feeling that pushed her; a feeling that something was missing. A feeling of guilt, and grief, and regret, something that was just out of grasp.Above all else, she had a feeling that finding him would help her find herself.Reversal AU, where Zelda was the one placed in the Shrine of Resurrection instead of Link.
Relationships: Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 40





	Fragments

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! First story on this site after a long time leading an idle existence through this account. I hope you enjoy it. This takes place between the beginning and the end of the game, except Zelda is the one who wakes.  
> :)

When Zelda opens her eyes for the first time in a hundred years, her body is weak, and her hair is damp. The pool of water that she steps out of had kept away the cool air that strikes her shaky form; the cave’s stone floor is freezing against her naked feet. She feels like a fish out of water - she has no grasp of her identity, no idea how she got to where she is, helpless in this pile of limbs that feel stitched to her skin for extra weight.

The only thing she knows is that her name is Zelda, and it was time for her to wake up.

The voice in her head is kind. It relaxes her, somehow, in its patience and softness. Like the tinkling of wooden chimes, he sounds like home. But his words raise more questions, more doubts, and the blinding sunlight as she scrambles to the closest hill takes away any comfort she’d gained, searing her pallid skin, her unused eyes.

The old man taunts her, convincing her to play his games for a glider she just _knows_ she needs, and she finds herself trusting him despite his strange ability to appear instantly everywhere she goes. There’s something right about this frustration, this need to oppose him, that she hasn’t fully understood.

Until he tells her that he is her father, the King, and that he’s sorry. 

(The grief and hurt doesn’t hit her until much later - not until she finds his office, not until she finds that woven leather journal.)

_Dear daughter… you must find your Knight. You must find Link. Hyrule's fate lies in your hands now._

When she gives her word to the King, who disappears into the evening light at her word, a bitter laugh catches in her throat - it occurs to her that she couldn’t even recall Link’s face. Her knight, her sworn protector… the man who was trapped in eternal battle with the one they called the Calamity. All she had to go by was his prayer and a dull, distant ache in her chest.

But she would find him. And she would stop this madness, whether out of a sense of remaining duty, or maybe…

Maybe because if she managed to find him... 

… maybe someday, she’d remember what happened.

___

Her first encounter with a Blue Bokoblin had ended with a thin slice of skin at the back of her neck, right where the rest of her long golden hair had once been. She was dimly aware of how close she’d been to dying, her only saving grace now a broken boko bat she’d used to bludgeon the bastard half to death and the steep overhang of a cliff she hadn’t even intended to kick his fellow beast off of. She’d gained her first real metal spear that day. She was proud, but she was a bit upset at the loss of her long, pretty hair.

Later, as she handed the lost maracas to the strangely large forest spirit, she would argue to herself that it had been a nuisance anyway, and that it was a lesson to keep a distance between herself and her enemies. She was much better at archery and strategy than close combat, even if she had to learn it all to survive. But she also knows her hair was one of the few things that tied her with her past. Flashes of memories came to her in a dream - kind, webbed fingers of a Zora raking it into intricate shapes; a tall woman’s red lips at the base of her head; the wind whipping it in a frenzy at her back; singed stray frizz that burned with the rest of her in the blistering heat. 

Gentle fingers caressing her cheek, hooking long strands behind her ear.

The loss brings back more of these sorts of _feelings_ . Never faces, never real, raw memories. Only an idea of what she once had. It frustrates her, especially when she meets Impa and sees her tattoo and _knows this woman is important_ , and yet she only remembers a whisper of a tug at her chest that she could barely call love. There is a need to hug this woman, one that shakes her even as she turns in her bed at the Kakariko inn. But she doesn’t act on it because she’s worried that it will only be construed as pity; Impa is a proud woman even at first glance, and Zelda had not recalled her name when she’d first seen her.

“You cut your hair?” the woman asks, seemingly distraught by the change. When Zelda explains what happens, the woman only nods. The sadness in her eyes does not leave.

That night when Zelda heads for Hateno, she wonders if despite her return, Impa still feels that awful ache from the loss of a friend who has forgotten. 

___

Her power of the Goddess reawakens at the sight of her first Guardian. The power is immense, overwhelming; it knocks her out, and when she wakes up, she’s at a stable, paying up what remains of the rupees in her purse for the two nights she’d stayed. 

Impa had encouraged her to find her memories in pictures saved on the Sheikah Slate, as had little Purah, a girl of an old woman that current Zelda never knew. Pictures, she realizes, when the first memory in front of the castle knocks her off of her feet, that she’d taken on her journeys with her faithful knight.

 _Cruel,_ she repeats in her head, a mantra that thrums her heartbeat into a heavy pounding. _Cruel, cruel, cruel Zelda,_ she was terrible to her faithful knight. She falls to her knees where he had once knelt, where she’d placed her hand over his head and made a fool out of him in front of her other friends, and she grieves for the one cursed to remain at her side and the terrible fate she’d led him to, deep within that evil castle.

She doesn’t hear the Guardian approach until it whirs to life with a thrumming beep, and all Zelda knows is throwing her hand forward and a flash of golden light. 

Impa tells her that her powers have awakened, and with it, she can free the Divine Beasts, but she needs to revisit the shrines meant for the hero to strengthen her power enough to expel the blight that feeds on the ancient beasts’ souls.

Her tasks are given in a strict order. “Learn to control your power. Free the Divine Beasts. Purify the corrupted lands, remember who you are. And destroy Ganon once and for all.”

All for a feeling, she reminds herself that night as she decides her next destination. All for a feeling of home.

She finds that each memory she finds makes her more desperate to chase the next. Finding them out of order is like whiplash - a slap to the face followed by a taste of something sweet. Even as she remembers that they’d eventually made amends, that she’d done everything to make it up to her kind knight, the regret is there as she remembers. A selfish, faithless, stupid girl, cruel to a knight who’d promised his life to an idiot princess and a world so much bigger than he’d imagined.

She spends hours running through fields, climbing mountains and gliding across the sky, just to find those places she’d walked with him. The more she remembers of his character, the greater her need to see him again grows, a burden that only gets heavier when she frees the Divine Beasts.

Their faces, the Champions - grief hides in her periphery, just out of her reach. Their sad smiles and encouragement, their sincere, heavy words - they’re meant for a Zelda that existed a hundred years ago, one that will likely never fully return. But Zelda holds onto their words, their memories - at least if not for herself, then for the faithful knight who calls to her from the depths to that wretched prison she once called her home.

 _Urbosa, his ally. Revali, his rival. Daruk, his brother. Mipha, his betrothed._ Their last words are all meant for him, and she takes them with her, along with their blessings of power.

 _I’m coming,_ she answers to the voice of the man who’d held her in his arms, the man who’d called her name over and over that fateful night until she couldn’t hear any longer. She kneels in the Ash Swamp where he once had, where she lay _dying_ , surrounded by now moss-covered machines in a calm field. She looks up at the twinkling stars, remembering his warmth, his fearful eyes, and she chokes. She can only hope he can hear her.

 _I’m coming_.

___

She finds her bow at the Spring of Wisdom, a beautiful weapon that when purified by each Spring would grant her the ability to channel Hylia’s power in her arrows. It is gifted to her by the dragon Naydra, and Zelda revels in the absurdity of the spirit’s insistence that such a weapon was never meant to be wielded by a priestess while there was a knight to hold it for her.

It makes her laugh. She laughs as she steps into the freezing spring, laughing in the face of the statue of Hylia until it turns into a furious scream, a monstrous roar. “My knight was meant to protect me, my knight was meant to die for me!” She shouts, her voice shaking from the cold. “Did it ever occur to you that I would ever need the strength to protect him?! That my powers only awakened because I wanted to save him?! If I had been given a weapon of my own, a blessing of equal power to stop the Calamity, none of this - NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED!”

Naydra does not speak - her voice rumbles in her throat. Zelda, somehow, understands. 

_“Your duty was never to protect your knight. Your duty was to preserve Hylia’s power. He was the one chosen to protect you.”_

Fury overwhelms her, and when she reaches the foot of the mountain, near-dying of hypothermia, she tears a wandering Lynel to shreds.“Not Chosen,” she whispers, kneeling in an empty valley, covered in blood and sweat, a battered shield in hand. “Cursed. For eternity, to die for a selfish, faithless, stupid girl… who’s greatest failure in the eyes of a Goddess was protecting _him_.”

___

Her eyes stray to the castle throughout her journey. It reorients her - reminds her where she is while reigniting that desperation, that feeling of something missing that she has no name for in her heart.

It’s during her second escapade into the castle that she has made up her mind - today will be the last Ganon spends in eternal battle with her faithful knight.

The Sanctum is covered in the Calamity’s stench, and when she looks before her, she is met with a nauseating, painful sight - the outline of a man covered in a thick film of oozing purple evil, clutching a sword that is buried into a spider-like beast that is bound to the floor of the chamber.

 _Zelda_ , the voice, his voice, it calls, it _begs._ There is a rumble, and the floor caves in.

When she reaches the bottom of the sanctuary, he is there, worn out, his sword on the ground, his eyes glazed but open. He reaches his knees, moving to stand with the help of his glowing blade, before he looks up to her.

Their eyes lock.

And Ganon _howls_.

___

The sky is clear. Link is gripping his sword with the blade turned down where the head of the giant beast of Calamity once lay. His hands are shaking; Zelda wants to reach out and hold them, but she resists, waiting for him to come to her.

He does, finally, get to his feet, sheathing his sword onto his back. He is just as Zelda remembers from those bits of memory - shorter by a hair, intense blue eyes, a patient expression on his face.

That hole in her heart, the one she couldn’t name - it fills, and then it floods. She knows it’s name now, the feeling that aches in her chest, the one that has haunted her in every call of his voice, in every night she dreamed, in every memory she found.

He steps forward, reaching his hand up, and it is only when his thumb swipes her lashes that she realizes she’s crying.

“I found you,” she whispers.

His gentle fingers brush against her cheek, hooking her short strands of hair behind her ear. There is a pregnant pause. Everything is still.

Slowly, his expression morphs into a hesitant smile, full of hopeful wonder. She waits for him to find his words. “Do you… remember me?” He asks, his voice quiet, raspy.

“Fragments,” she manages. “Of our time before. And the grief from knowing the people we lost.”

He nods, eyes downcast. He raises his hands, palms up, eyes searching - she knows what he’s feeling, that clear sign of being apart from his body for so long.

She’d help him remember, she decides. She’ll guide him, just as he had - she’d be there for him, just as he’d always been, at her side. This time, her life would forever be in his hands, just as it should have been a thousand lifetimes before.

(On their way to Kakariko, she finds it easy to believe that she can go another thousand lifetimes more if it means she can find him, again, and again, and again...)

“Link,” she calls, she _begs_.

She reaches her hands forward to grasp his, meeting his eyes for the third time in a hundred years. And then, she smiles.

“Let’s go home.”

___


End file.
